Microsoft's bricking of modified Xbox 360 consoles may bring the company its latest class action suit. Microsoft tells the over 1 million banned customers to buy a new Xbox 360 or deal with their crippled unit.

Legal firm is looking for banned Xbox owners to participate in suit

Gamers are really into tweaking their gear for fun and to achieve
the best performance during gameplay. PC gamers overclock their
hardware to get more performance for less money and console gamers
have modded their Xbox 360 consoles for many reasons (some for
innocent reasons, some for nefarious reasons).

Microsoft
appears to feel that the only reason to mod an Xbox 360 is to allow
the console to play pirated download software. A law firm based in
Texas that specializes in IP has launched a new website to gather
Xbox 360 users who have been banned for modding their consoles. The
main goal of the firm is to find out whether there are enough console
owners that were banned to start
a class action suit against Microsoft.

The law firm wrote
on its website, "Microsoft has chosen to use one of the most
indiscriminate "weapons" in its arsenal in an effort to
combat piracy -- as a result, use of this "weapon" has
resulted in a great deal of collateral damage -- many people were
affected who had nothing to do with piracy."

According to
the law firm, AbingtonIP, the bans were strategically timed so that
they didn’t interfere with the sales and new Xbox Live
registrations that were seen around the launch of HALO ODST
and the recent launch of Modern Warfare 2. AbingtonIP states
that had the bans happened before the launch of these games the
profits reaped by Microsoft would have been diminished.

So far
the Xbox 360 ban has led to more than 1
million consoles being banned from the network with the official
recourse for the banned players being to buy a new console and not
mod it this time around. A potential fix for banned consoles that
doesn't involve buying a new Xbox 360 surfaced. The workaround is
called iXtreme
LT and the goal of the workaround is to provide a minimum amount
of security checks and make the firmware as close to stock as
possible to avoid detection and the resulting ban.

The fix
arrived but was rather complex and required that the Xbox 360 not
have been updated or the player to have access to the CPU key of the
console. DailyTech has also spoke
with an attorney -- Jeffrey Johnson -- about the banning of Xbox
360 console form the Xbox Live network.

Microsoft's official
statement on the banning of certain consoles reads, "Our
commitment to combat piracy and support safer and more secure
gameplay for the more than 20 million members of our Xbox Live
community remains a top priority,” he wrote. “All consumers
should know that piracy is illegal, and that modifying their Xbox 360
console to play pirated discs, violates the Xbox Live terms of use,
will void their warranty and result in a ban from Xbox Live."

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

quote: I Tell people, PAY/PLAY.. MEANING that if you pay for the game, you WILL play the hell out of it, as you Worked for it.. YOU do indeed get what you pay for..

I agree with your point here, however this will not always be the case. For example, I do purchase my games and my Xbox is not modded. I do however own a copy of Civilizations, that I've owned for a while. Well, somehow, the disk got a nick in it and I can't play it anymore. I found that companies generally only offer replacement disks for approx the first 90 days that you own the game, after that, nothing. I did pay for the game, however I can no longer play it.

I've experienced even greater headaches with PC games. I've had damaged discs, and even games that would refuse to play because of copy protection; and I used the actual game disc. Also, before you ask about image drives, I did have an image drive installed to mount iso files, however I uninstalled my image drives, and even uninstalled all of the iso creating software and some of the games still wouldn't play..

Anyway, my point is I believe there should be some legitimate way to backup your purchased disks to a hard disk and play from there. I'm not claiming I know how to make this work, but I do understand the desire to mod an Xbox to play games, though I do agree that the person should purchase the game they want to play.

Sometimes, you can pay for a game and you don't get to "play the hell out of it".

One more thought...I highly support the idea of Steam on PC. I know you can purchase and download games on Xbox as well, but it's my understanding that they're encrypted and the only way to decrypt them is to get a key that loads each time you sign into Xbox Live. I don't know if that is true, but it's what I heard. I don't like the encryption idea, because if I ever cancel my Xbox Live account, or lose my internet, or change gamertags or whatever, I may lose the games I purchased.

"Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be." -- Steve Ballmer